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The New Yorker On Spam
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· Score: 3, Informative
The New Yorker may not be exactly the MSM, but it is pretty influential. What were you hoping? That if it were mainstream media (MSM), it would bring to light the problems of spam? That it would influence the businessmen & marketers that make the spam?
This article is a great short history on spam but no new information was presented to me here (and judging from the summary neither did it shed light on anything new to you).
I laugh at either of these hopes because the average person already deals with spam daily (my relatives began reaching out for me on ways to censor that from my younger cousins years ago) and we have a different mindset than businessmen & marketers.
The article mentions the epic article by Paul Graham entitled "A Plan for Spam." It may look long and arduous but I heavily recommend you read that. I will not forget reading that article nor will Slashdot. I think it helps more for the "mainstream media" to publish things like this for their readers.
Yes, it has code in it. Yes, it requires a bit of a priori knowledge in some places (pun intended). But, you know, a lot of times the best stuff comes from outsiders and I personally think that newspapers should develop a 'tech section' where they can throw off the mittens & grade school knowledge that need to be on in order to handle your average reader. I know many newspapers have entire sections devoted to sports--sometimes even just one particular sport if it's in season! I've seen many newspapers have 'articles/ads' for new automobiles, why not new technology? I know Popular Mechanics is... well, popular for lack of a better word so why aren't newspapers picking up on this and printing more tech-heavy articles? I guess all I can do is bitch about it because I don't have the same mindset as the people trying to sell the news.
Which brings me back to an important point, you're not going to change anyone's mind. Everyone knows about it and if you think that Wallstreet businessmen are going to pick up the New Yorker & their jaw will drop when they read this article, you're sadly mistaken. If you think marketers will read this and say "My God, I need to start thinking about what I'm doing to the networks of the world," you're deluding yourself.
What we need is an article that causes people to seriously ask themselves how we can keep e-mail free and uncensored while at the same time stopping spam. When I was asked by my aunt, they were concerned for their daughter using the internet and opening a spam message to see a guy with his legs split around a phallic-looking cactus in an ad for Viagra. I showed them how to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express and how to turn on junk mail filter. I also pointed out how vulnerable you leave yourself to spam if you print your e-mail in plain text on the internet. They never had a problem with it again.
So while this article is informational, it does nothing practical for the reader. I realize--and I think a lot of people will agree with me--that the best way to stop spam is to stop clicking on it and show others how to do the same. The 0.001% response will dry up and spammers will drop off. Articles on how to configure yourself to spot spam would probably be the best thing mainstream media could print--sure would have helped my relatives!
I'd like to suggest that if you HAD read his books, you'd ask him to please put down the pen and do something else. I'm sorry, I can't ask anyone to stop writing a book. I can ask people to stop acting or directing movies but for some reason another book on earth can only be good.
I don't know why. I think it's because the millions paid to make Kangaroo Jack could feed an entire African nation for quite some time. And that writing a book usually costs a person just enough to live and get by while it's in the process. I see books as more of a pure form of free speech also and I never want to see a book censored or banned regardless of its content. Purist, idealist view I know but if I had a religion it would be centered around that.
Maybe it's because the world wanted James Joyce to stop writing. Maybe it's because the world wanted Anthony Burgess to stop writing. If they had succeeded, we wouldn't have Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Two monumental masterpieces in my mind.
Don't ask him to stop writing, I'm sure someone somewhere still enjoys the works, you don't have to keep reading them. I no longer read Crichton or Stephen King even though I read everything by them in eighth grade. Is it because I've grown up or they've changed? I cannot say but I still hope they author novels until their dying day so that others may enjoy them.
What does a bad book by an author you once loved hurt you? Let them publish, read the reviews and pick carefully. I think that deep down inside you'd still read them and get some enjoyment even if it's just discussing them with your friends.
There's two things I'd like to mention after reading this interview. First, let's give the original credit of a technology explosion or singularity to I. J. Good and his quote:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. I think that predates Verner Vinge but he certainly never built it into a story like Vinge.
Second, I would like to point out that every non-fiction book or movie I have read requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. Whether I'm watching Remains of the Day or Demolition Man, I need to look past illogical or non-scientific aspects of the movies. Does this detract from the story? Some would say yes, I would say only a little bit. I am very forgiving in literature. I have read many old Stanislaw Lem novels and the complex emotions the robots display is impossible--the physics of the robots are even more impossible. But Lem's stories are still great, given I can get past a robot with no energy input survives millions of years in space.
So although I have not read William Gibson's works, I ask him not to give up on writing. You will have another good idea and you will write another book about it. Just wait for it to come.
As for this idea of technology actually achieving this event horizon described by Good or Gibson or Vinge, I don't think that it's achievable. I can't prove it won't happen just like you can't prove it will happen. All I will say is that I don't even know where to begin. I would start with digesting the world wide web & developing a logic and reasoning engine to decide which statements are true and which are fact and which are neither. When it would be done, it may be 'more intelligent' than I but not 'more intelligent' than the sum of all human knowledge.
I think there will always be a "???" in the game plan to make an artificially intelligent robot that functions intelligently on a human level or higher. I just don't see a way around it. That doesn't mean we should ever stop writing about it though.
Sci-fi is fun, not something that is completely scientifically accurate--it just is a lot more fun when you explore the gray areas we don't understand or theorize about. Enjoy it while you can!
McKeon eventually found a welcoming culture at The Chubb Corp., where she is now an application manager, but other women in IT simply leave the industry. Other female friendly IT companies include:
The game seems to be insanely huge and how is it that there can be an infinite amount of different creates created in the game? The word infinite gets abused quite a bit.
I think you meant to say 'seemingly infinite' or 'infinite for all intents and purposes.'
I've tried to think of mental exercises to challenge people with a concept of something being infinite. For example, if you had an object of infinite mass with no gravity, would it be possible for us to exist alongside this infinite object?
Infinity has interesting properties and I challenge the use of 'infinite' in this summary. The article uses cautious words:
Procedural programming essentially shrinks the technological world, allowing us to fit a lot more information in limited space, and allowing this information to interact in near infinite ways. The basic theory of how one would store infinite states of data instantly disqualifies any device I know of. Computers, game systems, etc. are ultimately storing data in a binary on/off form. You can story many bits of data and come up with many states very quickly. You cannot, however, store an infinite amount of states on a finite amount of bytes. There's just no way to do it. A very large amount of different states? Of course. But not an infinite amount.
For the purposes of speculation, what would be the best way to give a user a seemingly 'infinite' number of states? Well, the obvious choice (and what random number generators on computers seem to favor) is to use time. Time is infinitely divisible (although the representation of that depends on decimal precision) and it is (seemingly) never ending. So one would base the resulting states in the game off of when a user entered input. It is still very easy to show that this is a many-to-one mapping. You can divide time down to a small enough unit that they are technically different moments yet the hardware that captures the analog input cannot discern between them.
I think that this concept of 'infinite' states is desirable to gamers. And it's the states that you find yourself in in a game that were clearly not thought out by the developers that makes a game special. When you have a large freedom of configuration pitted against players with that same freedom, you have the core success behind real time strategy games where players would build cities and armies and pit them against each other.
I don't think this claim can ever be made when a digital machine is being used. I guess you could design a program that would adjust to the size of the machine and extrapolate the amount of precision it used to measure the moment at which the user clicked the remote button and then stamped this number on the create's forehead (or some other form of uniqueness). But, I do not know enough about how the CPU acquires the time stamp. If it's a quartz crystal, this is only accurate to the number of vibration the crystal makes per second with electricity pumped through it. I have good reason to believe you will always encounter some theoretical issue or barrier when trying to achieve truly infinite implementations. Best to leave that word where it belongs: in mathematicl proofs and scientific theories.
I apologize for submitting a dupe. Are you an editor?
If not, I don't see any reason for you to apologize. Even if you are, it's not like you're duping an article within a couple of days or less. Because I've bitched about dupes many times before. Many times. Which implies that I hold the editors to a high standard. If I can't be a standard candle for them when I submit stories, how can I expect them to hold these artificially high standards I force them to?
Too many times, I've said that if they just went to Google or Google news and typed "site:slashdot.org Microsoft OSI" they would find the dupe from a few days ago about a story with basically the same keywords. I mean, you could even build a link on the admin page for them to click and do that search.
I apologized because I submitted before taking my own advice, leading to what I considered a dupe.
I apologized for being a hypocrite. It's a basic idea of not contradicting yourself that was ingrained into me when I was a child & seems to be lost these days. You act like you would want someone else to act (the ultimate maxim) and it's clear to me that everyone hates a dupe so I apologize.
FOSS I think there's a difference between FOSS & OSS. FOSS has that modifier 'free' and OSS is just opening your source. You can still open your source and charge money for the product. In fact, I think if you opened your source to only the people that bought your product, you'd still be pretty close to being OSS, right?
Linux is open source to an extent. You only have to release the source code to those who you distribute it to. Take Google, for example, to my knowledge they run a stripped down Red Hat kernel on hundreds of thousands of machines. Have they released this modified code that runs the core of their search engine? Nope.
The same could be true of Microsoft. Say I'm using the.NET framework and ASPs and all that bad stuff to write webpages. Well, with a competing open source technologies, I just point my editor at the mound-o-source that I untarred on my machine and I can step all the way from my code to their code to the point where the framework borks. Well, if Microsoft distributed the.NET source with every release of.NET, that makes a world of difference to me. Granted, I'm pretty sold on the free stuff (what with not having to pay for anything) but this would be a step towards me and Microsoft working together.
Their software system & security is broken. Unfortunately their marketing and business divisions are top notch world class--that means we have to put up with the former. I hope they get as close to making me happy as possible. Would it be out of the question for them to release at least some of the Windows source code or IE's source code? I hope not, I would dearly like to see what the hell that rendering engine is doing sometimes... but I can't.
Their fears are obvious, people scanning the code for bugs... both good and bad. A bad PR blog that points out high school mistakes in Vista would be pretty crushing--especially if the posters intents were good! Why? Because they can't even demonize that person.
I seriously hope you change your mind about Microsoft. I mean, I hope that the community--those who make the decisions--are willing to work with Microsoft or at least hear them out. The open source community and licenses should be safe enough that anyone can use them or take part in them without finding a haft of a knife in their back. If they aren't, they need to be changed, hence all the debate on the GPLv3. If you're telling me that Microsoft is exploiting the Open Source Initiative for their own good, I question who's at fault here--Microsoft or OSI? Because Microsoft excels at making software make money, open source should excel just at making software work for everyone.
Ok, so after I submitted this story this morning (while I was grasping for sobriety), I noticed that this topic was already covered last week but the Port25 posting is news--somewhat.
I apologize for submitting a dupe.
From that blog posting:
I also run a training class that teaches people around the company how to engage in open source projects and make them successful. Now, after reading the higher ranked comments from the first article, I know many of you saw this as disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics on order with a politician, the RIAA or Steve Ballmer.
But this blog is written by someone who's genuinely interested in Microsoft becoming part of OSS efforts. Will it happen? Probably not as a good many of you pointed out.
The real question is, when it doesn't happen, what was the real reason? This is tough, because Microsoft is a large company. I felt the pain of using their products when I had to stay at work until midnight on Wednesday trying to get AJAX (that worked fine in Firefox) working in IE. But this is only one of their many products. Is it fair for me to condemn their application for hundreds of other products for OSS certification based on a few tools I've used?
My answer to that is that "I don't think so."
What I'm trying to say is that the open source community is a community. Once you start to blame Microsoft for everything, turn a cold shoulder towards them whenever they even mildly reach out, you're essentially becoming them on the other side of the mirror. What's worse is that this attitude will ensure that there will never be a point in time in the future when Microsoft can reconcile with OSS. I think the fact that even one person inside the company is reaching out says that Microsoft as an entity is not 100% against opening a code base. They have great marketing and business tactics, they are hear to stay for as far as I can see. I think that the attitude should be open arms under the right conditions instead of a persistent never ending cold war or middle east-style conflict in software today.
Will I be jumped on as not being a hardliner open source advocate? Probably. Because I care far more about the success of everyone than I do the success of either side.
The people running the accreditation will no doubt be very stringent on the licenses passing OSS certification. I'm not a lawyer but I doubt any of the MS-GL/SL/RL licenses will pass. I hope it's not an outright rejection. I hope there's talking between the OSI and MS, I hope there's negotiations, I chances are given, I hope for compromise, I hope that some of the projects end up as OSS, I hope to use Microsoft's software, whether I pay for it or not, and to be able to see the source in the future.
Everyone needs to make money, I need to make money. This is a capitalistic society. I don't blame Microsoft for making money, I blame them for failing to see the folly of their position. I believe a different pricing scheme could net them billions more dollars & millions more users. I believe that slowly opening up the code on more and more of their products can only improve it. I believe that people will steal it one way or another if they want to so your job shouldn't be to catch them but to take away that motivation.
In the end, if you rail against Microsoft for doing this, you're only building the barrier higher. I wouldn't recommend an "you're either with us or against us" attitude, I personally do not feel that has gotten anyone anywhere before. The world is not black & white, software is no different.
I don't care for this. They get paid for their job. They get a 'thank you' from me and other people. They don't act like my servant, they give me more crap than I give them, they're not here at all hours of the night when I'm coding to help me, they don't care whether I succeed, etc. It's not like they're an administrative assistant (Secretary's Day) to one person who needs to show them some appreciation once a day.
Why do System Administrators get a day? Why not Database Administrators? Why not Systems Architects? Why not Software Developers? All of these people are needed just as much as any of the others to achieve success.
System Administrators must be much different at other companies because I haven't met one that I've particularly thought deserves a whole freaking day devoted to celebrating them.
If you can read this, thank your sysadmin Yeah, and when do you think the Software Developer who made and maintains the page, the web browser, the web server and the operating systems of both the client and host? Gee, it's not hard to recognize that everyone contributes a vital need to meet a goal. If they didn't, they wouldn't be on the team!
Flamebait, I know... but I had to get that off my chest.
Anyone who cares already knows. Anyone who wants to find out, can find out. Well, that's not true, as it turns out, I care but I'm not afraid to admit I didn't know any of these things that Linus felt (having joined the game late, nor have I seen the documentation for the first release). And I don't go around looking at the history of software I use, I simply use the software. I use gcc but I'm not so sure its history would be that interesting to me.
Come on, this is like doing a history of the First World War again, complete with photos of the Arch-Duke. I don't think that's a very good analogy. This wasn't really a history of the Linux kernel, more so a short intro to the attitude of the single point in the beginning. In my opinion, reading through this and scanning the attached documents would be more like if you had given me the first three pages of the Bible. "In the beginning, there was this guy that wasn't very sure anything would come of a project..." This is a good article because I kind of always thought that Torvalds started Linux knowing it was going to be big. I imagined him sitting down one day and saying, "F this noise, I'm going to write an operating system that works... and I'll distribute it for free!"... except in Swedish?
But that's not what happened and I think that's important for people to recognize. This was not unlike Frodo starting off on a quest thinking he wasn't going to get anywhere (though the motivation and implications are not so huge). It's the classic hero-by-accident story and since it's a true story, I love it all the more.
You know, I always thought about writing to Paul Harvey (if he's still alive) and asking him to do a "And that's the rest of the story" on Linus. That would be some classic stuff. Although most the listeners, probably not even sure what Linux is let alone know its creator Linus, would probably think he's suffering from some form of dementia set on by age...
And it isn't something the is deserving of a place on this website! Are you kidding me? This actually makes me want to start some open source project even though I recognize it will probably go nowhere. Of course this belongs on this site.
This technology allows the individual to log into their home machine from a remote location and, among many other things, add torrents, pause a download, or discontinue a download. The title of this article is pretty misleading. It looks like they've basically made a webpage for their BitTorrent and then made a special css for a cell phone viewing it.
Not extremely innovative, I've seen web interfaces for torrent clients.
Neat? Yes. A good project? Maybe. "Huge step forward?" Not really, in my opinion.
I question the motives for bringing torrents to cellphones unless you can use other cell phones as download points (hence the name Peer to Peer). That's where the speedup comes from. I think cell phones are pinched at their access point, P2P apps on the phone aren't going to change that, they will even make it worse if both phones are fighting two separate choke points. Not sure if this is well thought out.
Seems to be primarily concerned wtih acquisitions that caused the death of companies. What about the acquisition and death of Netscape? I don't think it deserved to die and it was pretty much decided in multiple settlements that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows destroyed any chance Netscape had.
I've personally never used their old products but, you know, I do use Mozilla and it's derivatives and it's a fine browser. Unfortunate they didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell with Microsoft's actions.
"We will be approaching speeds of... 3!" Ah, yes, a Space Mutiny quote, a very good one. I have so many favorites, perhaps I'll keep the trend going with another one from that show: "Look alive everyone... oh, I'm sorry, not you, Susan." (in reference to a character who had died earlier in the movie but, for some reason, showed back up on the control room alive and well, working in another scene)
I'm going to suggest an alternate site, IGN's review of it which, surprisingly, gave it a 9 out of 10--so I'll have to find this. From that review:
The basic framework of The Film Crew is simple enough; three average men have been hired by media mogul Bob Honcho and given the task of recording a commentary track for every film ever made. Naturally it's a conceit to get Mike, Kevin and Bill back to doing what they do best; tearing the film industry's lesser children to ribbons. The structure of each Film Crew release is similar to MST3k in most respects, the only main difference is the lack of commercial breaks and less interstitial sketches - which most MST3k fans never considered to be that essential anyhow. The films are divided in two sections by a "lunch break" sketch which the guys sit around, you guessed it, the lunch table. The main difference of The Film Crew is the lack of the signature character silhouettes at the bottom of the screen while the movie plays, not a huge loss overall but it does mean that they can no longer interact with the on-screen action when the verbal jokes run thin.
A few months back on Shout!'s website, fans were asked to vote on which of the four scheduled Film Crew releases would be the first on store shelves, the winner was the 1961 clunker Hollywood After Dark. Also know as Walk The Angry Beach and The Unholy Choice, the "film" features future Golden Girls star Rue McClanahan getting down to her skivvies and shaking it for all she's worth when her acting career fails - oddly enough that's the story of the film too. It might also be worth mentioning the Rifftrax effort they put together a while ago, with more info/comments on the Slashdot article.
This article was a fairly interesting journey into Shannon's world of Information Theory but, in my opinion, it is little more than an exercise in applying that kind of idea to user input devices on small electronics.
I understand the enumeration and recognize that it scales quite quickly per key. The reason I don't think this has been employed or will be employed is that people are not willing to take the time climb a learning curve--even if it would take them a few weeks of memorization and the time saved over their life will be huge. If that were the case, we'd all just use one button and our handhelds would interpret Morse code (see summary). The implementation discussed here is probably even more confusing than Morse code.
On my current phone, I have 9 buttons that I push and depress to cycle through different sections of the alphabet. How is this any different? It's four less buttons and a hell of a lot more memorizing, if you ask me.
From the Wikipedia entry:
The most popular forms are international draughts, played on a 10×10 board, followed by English draughts, also called American checkers that is played on an 8×8 board, but there are many other variants. Draughts developed from alquerque.[2] Draughts would be a much much larger gamespace than Checkers. I noticed that draughts appeared in the tags of this story but it shouldn't.
The source also tells me that DRM is the only plausible "tool" at the disposal of webcasters to accomplish SoundExchange's goal of working to stop music "streamripping." I can't think of a way to stop 'streamripping.' I mean, even if you closed the loop all the way down to my soundcard, it would still have to come out as sound in some quality or another. Once it's in that analog form, I just pipe it into another input device on the same or different machine and begin recording. I've used TotalRecorder to just copy the buffer of my sound card to a file and have captured many NPR shows that I could not find otherwise to purchase.
How in the hell could DRM prevent this?
But, then again, look at what I'm criticizing! I challenge anyone to list one technology or product that DRM has successfully 'worked' on (in that it prevents piracy). This is laughable and brings the phrase "defective by design" to whole new levels I never thought possible. Not only will it be defective, use cycles and memory on your machine but it will probably make the quality worse. Bravo, DRM, bravo.
Nothing I've found on this lays out the implementation so here's my prediction. SoundExchange wants the minimum offer/DRM model in place. Then they can prove it's possible to still streamrip. Then where does that put the web radio sites? At the mercy of SoundExchange, of course, because they implemented something that didn't satisfy a contract.
Having experienced all the above software (with the exception of Earthlink application software whatever that is), I'm going to say that yes, it is loaded with crapware. Scariest one on that list would probably be the earthlink application software because that's the most generic name for a product I can ever think of.
The other differences between these two machines is they have comparable memory, DVD burner & GPU, the Dell's hard drive & CPU are a lot better. The ArsTechnica article mentions upgrades at a price, you could probably get the IMPACT up to the Dell range and get it close which is probably pretty important for the average consumer who doesn't want to deal with the ordeal of reinstalling Windows just to get a clean slate.
... and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. I hope, for the sake of everything that I believe in, this is a false statement. It's sad that I have to go on living knowing that while I was alive a man was elected president of my country (twice!) & in that time, he was able to put a foul taste in your mouth upon saying "democracy."
I guess we can still say that the core ideas of democracy are good, that only awful men with awful goals and intentions used democracy to do wrong. I guess today Marxism sounds like an idea with potential though historically men like Joseph Stalin & Mao Zedong have given it a social stigma that the terrible things they did under its name are inherent and must occur when the idea is put into practice.
I hope the rest of the world is not convinced that democracy comes hand in hand with the actions of the United States of America today. Hopefully other countries will become model democracies for the rest of the world.
I hope the theory of democracy is resilient enough to withstand the current administration and that it survives as a concept that can be taught to children as the model of the most fair form of government. I also hope that the rest of the world aspires to become democratic--as has been the popular progression for quite sometime. Ironically, we are tarnishing the image of a system that we hope the Iraqi people to embrace--quite possibly the reason that effort fails.
The history books will indeed be interesting to read when I am a withered old man.
I like this quote from Winston Churchill that explains while democracy is not perfect, it is the best we've got:
Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
I know a lot of people are going to find something to complain about with these new bugs--no, wait--features of our beloved and adored Adobe Flash plugin but I think we should turn these lemons into lemonade and recognize all the fun things people can do with a tool like a keystroke logger:
Get an extremely accurate analysis of your words per minute in typing.
Search through the log and double check that you correctly entered all of your banking account numbers, credit card and personal information on all of your internet forms.
Do searches on the log to see if you ever accidentally typed "teh" and how many times that happened.
Compare your Letter Frequency to the standard featured in Edgar Alan Poe's The Gold Bug
As you can see, there are many fun & great things that one can do with the potential of these new key logging features.
So by posting this, am I spreading fud about spreading fud? I think I broke my brain. If your brain is broken, it's probably because you tried to read this article!
I wouldn't call them journalists and sully my own profession If you are a journalist, I think that implies that you have a high standard in how you report news. I hate to say it but not only is your formatting terrible and your grammar lacking in places, your piece is possibly just as one-sided as the "FUD" spreaders you speak of. On top of that, you present very few facts or examples to back up your argument.
Detractors - the fear squad - would, of course, say that he's on one side of the equation.
True.
That doesn't mean that his arguments don't have merit. It certainly doesn't, but just because these 'tech bloggers' are the other side of the equation and they have a pay check at stake doesn't mean that their argument isn't equally as valid--does it?
I've never even heard the arguments and underpinnings against the GPLv3 concerning the adoption of Linux! Perhaps you should include both sides of the discussion in your article if you wish for me to consider you a journalist.
I understand the difference between the two courses (CS being the study of the principles and concepts involved in Computing at a more fundamental, and often more sophisticated level, and IT being a more practical, application based approach to computing), but would like to know from anybody who has studied either or both of the courses what kinds of careers each course would lead into and what would you recommend for someone such as myself, having a broad range of interests and wishing to dabble in everything before deciding where to specialise? Well, I've never been through the British education system, only the American one. So I'll give you the advice I would give anyone I know in America.
If you're planning on doing a two year technical college kind of thing then I recommend you to do otherwise. The auxillary courses that a four year technical college gave me have to a great extent been useful (possibly more so than the technical courses I took).
Assuming you've got a four year college plan, I would recommend you make two separate plans from your college's website. Take the IT path and pick out all your generals & then all your electives (it doesn't have to be accurate, just a rough guess). Then do the same with computer science. I'll bet you'll see that a lot of general electives overlap so take mostly those your first semester. While you're there, I think you'll be exposed to more students in the same and other realms. How do you so easily discount electrical engineering when IT & computer science are your obvious choices?
In America, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with changing from one to the other in the middle of your college career. It might mean more work but that's better than a lifetime of regret. In fact, it's almost expected you change your mind five or six times in college where I went to school. Sure, it'd take people five or six years to graduate but it's their choice.
I would recommend you do the above for not only IT & CSci but also EE & Computer Engineering (kind of a cross between CSci & EE). In my undergrad, I took CSci, Math & Music Theory courses to a heavy extent. I finished one class away from a math minor and one class away from a music minor. I'm really happy that I was able to take those diverse courses that were often a refreshing break from Computer Science. But, in the end, I almost wish I had committed to the Computer Engineering course even though it would have edged out the extra math and music I took because it is such a demanding program.
In the end, there's jobs in both these fields. I can't argue for one over the other because I don't like IT/Business people. Why do I hate them? Because I don't think they really care about anything other than money and they're often performing trivial jobs... so maybe I feel sorry for them more than I hate them. I'm sure you're a very different person than I am, so it would be pointless for me to recommend you take CSci because in all likelihood, we have different values of different kinds of work.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is a great short history on spam but no new information was presented to me here (and judging from the summary neither did it shed light on anything new to you).
I laugh at either of these hopes because the average person already deals with spam daily (my relatives began reaching out for me on ways to censor that from my younger cousins years ago) and we have a different mindset than businessmen & marketers.
The article mentions the epic article by Paul Graham entitled "A Plan for Spam." It may look long and arduous but I heavily recommend you read that. I will not forget reading that article nor will Slashdot. I think it helps more for the "mainstream media" to publish things like this for their readers.
Yes, it has code in it. Yes, it requires a bit of a priori knowledge in some places (pun intended). But, you know, a lot of times the best stuff comes from outsiders and I personally think that newspapers should develop a 'tech section' where they can throw off the mittens & grade school knowledge that need to be on in order to handle your average reader. I know many newspapers have entire sections devoted to sports--sometimes even just one particular sport if it's in season! I've seen many newspapers have 'articles/ads' for new automobiles, why not new technology? I know Popular Mechanics is
Which brings me back to an important point, you're not going to change anyone's mind. Everyone knows about it and if you think that Wallstreet businessmen are going to pick up the New Yorker & their jaw will drop when they read this article, you're sadly mistaken. If you think marketers will read this and say "My God, I need to start thinking about what I'm doing to the networks of the world," you're deluding yourself.
What we need is an article that causes people to seriously ask themselves how we can keep e-mail free and uncensored while at the same time stopping spam. When I was asked by my aunt, they were concerned for their daughter using the internet and opening a spam message to see a guy with his legs split around a phallic-looking cactus in an ad for Viagra. I showed them how to use Thunderbird instead of Outlook Express and how to turn on junk mail filter. I also pointed out how vulnerable you leave yourself to spam if you print your e-mail in plain text on the internet. They never had a problem with it again.
So while this article is informational, it does nothing practical for the reader. I realize--and I think a lot of people will agree with me--that the best way to stop spam is to stop clicking on it and show others how to do the same. The 0.001% response will dry up and spammers will drop off. Articles on how to configure yourself to spot spam would probably be the best thing mainstream media could print--sure would have helped my relatives!
I don't know why. I think it's because the millions paid to make Kangaroo Jack could feed an entire African nation for quite some time. And that writing a book usually costs a person just enough to live and get by while it's in the process. I see books as more of a pure form of free speech also and I never want to see a book censored or banned regardless of its content. Purist, idealist view I know but if I had a religion it would be centered around that.
Maybe it's because the world wanted James Joyce to stop writing. Maybe it's because the world wanted Anthony Burgess to stop writing. If they had succeeded, we wouldn't have Ulysses or A Clockwork Orange. Two monumental masterpieces in my mind.
Don't ask him to stop writing, I'm sure someone somewhere still enjoys the works, you don't have to keep reading them. I no longer read Crichton or Stephen King even though I read everything by them in eighth grade. Is it because I've grown up or they've changed? I cannot say but I still hope they author novels until their dying day so that others may enjoy them.
What does a bad book by an author you once loved hurt you? Let them publish, read the reviews and pick carefully. I think that deep down inside you'd still read them and get some enjoyment even if it's just discussing them with your friends.
Second, I would like to point out that every non-fiction book or movie I have read requires some degree of suspension of disbelief. Whether I'm watching Remains of the Day or Demolition Man, I need to look past illogical or non-scientific aspects of the movies. Does this detract from the story? Some would say yes, I would say only a little bit. I am very forgiving in literature. I have read many old Stanislaw Lem novels and the complex emotions the robots display is impossible--the physics of the robots are even more impossible. But Lem's stories are still great, given I can get past a robot with no energy input survives millions of years in space.
So although I have not read William Gibson's works, I ask him not to give up on writing. You will have another good idea and you will write another book about it. Just wait for it to come.
As for this idea of technology actually achieving this event horizon described by Good or Gibson or Vinge, I don't think that it's achievable. I can't prove it won't happen just like you can't prove it will happen. All I will say is that I don't even know where to begin. I would start with digesting the world wide web & developing a logic and reasoning engine to decide which statements are true and which are fact and which are neither. When it would be done, it may be 'more intelligent' than I but not 'more intelligent' than the sum of all human knowledge.
I think there will always be a "???" in the game plan to make an artificially intelligent robot that functions intelligently on a human level or higher. I just don't see a way around it. That doesn't mean we should ever stop writing about it though.
Sci-fi is fun, not something that is completely scientifically accurate--it just is a lot more fun when you explore the gray areas we don't understand or theorize about. Enjoy it while you can!
- The well know pen island at www.PenisLand.net
- The Royal Tit-Watching (Ornithological) Society Of Britain at www.Nice-Tits.org
- Dickson's temperature equipment at www.DicksOnWeb.com
- The well known scaffolding company, www.MammothErection.com
- Big Al's Fishing company, www.BiGalsOnline.com
- Web One at www.WeBone.com
There are tons of women friendly companies out there!I think you meant to say 'seemingly infinite' or 'infinite for all intents and purposes.'
I've tried to think of mental exercises to challenge people with a concept of something being infinite. For example, if you had an object of infinite mass with no gravity, would it be possible for us to exist alongside this infinite object?
Infinity has interesting properties and I challenge the use of 'infinite' in this summary. The article uses cautious words: Procedural programming essentially shrinks the technological world, allowing us to fit a lot more information in limited space, and allowing this information to interact in near infinite ways. The basic theory of how one would store infinite states of data instantly disqualifies any device I know of. Computers, game systems, etc. are ultimately storing data in a binary on/off form. You can story many bits of data and come up with many states very quickly. You cannot, however, store an infinite amount of states on a finite amount of bytes. There's just no way to do it. A very large amount of different states? Of course. But not an infinite amount.
For the purposes of speculation, what would be the best way to give a user a seemingly 'infinite' number of states? Well, the obvious choice (and what random number generators on computers seem to favor) is to use time. Time is infinitely divisible (although the representation of that depends on decimal precision) and it is (seemingly) never ending. So one would base the resulting states in the game off of when a user entered input. It is still very easy to show that this is a many-to-one mapping. You can divide time down to a small enough unit that they are technically different moments yet the hardware that captures the analog input cannot discern between them.
I think that this concept of 'infinite' states is desirable to gamers. And it's the states that you find yourself in in a game that were clearly not thought out by the developers that makes a game special. When you have a large freedom of configuration pitted against players with that same freedom, you have the core success behind real time strategy games where players would build cities and armies and pit them against each other.
I don't think this claim can ever be made when a digital machine is being used. I guess you could design a program that would adjust to the size of the machine and extrapolate the amount of precision it used to measure the moment at which the user clicked the remote button and then stamped this number on the create's forehead (or some other form of uniqueness). But, I do not know enough about how the CPU acquires the time stamp. If it's a quartz crystal, this is only accurate to the number of vibration the crystal makes per second with electricity pumped through it. I have good reason to believe you will always encounter some theoretical issue or barrier when trying to achieve truly infinite implementations. Best to leave that word where it belongs: in mathematicl proofs and scientific theories.
If not, I don't see any reason for you to apologize. Even if you are, it's not like you're duping an article within a couple of days or less. Because I've bitched about dupes many times before. Many times. Which implies that I hold the editors to a high standard. If I can't be a standard candle for them when I submit stories, how can I expect them to hold these artificially high standards I force them to?
Too many times, I've said that if they just went to Google or Google news and typed "site:slashdot.org Microsoft OSI" they would find the dupe from a few days ago about a story with basically the same keywords. I mean, you could even build a link on the admin page for them to click and do that search.
I apologized because I submitted before taking my own advice, leading to what I considered a dupe.
I apologized for being a hypocrite. It's a basic idea of not contradicting yourself that was ingrained into me when I was a child & seems to be lost these days. You act like you would want someone else to act (the ultimate maxim) and it's clear to me that everyone hates a dupe so I apologize.
Linux is open source to an extent. You only have to release the source code to those who you distribute it to. Take Google, for example, to my knowledge they run a stripped down Red Hat kernel on hundreds of thousands of machines. Have they released this modified code that runs the core of their search engine? Nope.
The same could be true of Microsoft. Say I'm using the
Their software system & security is broken. Unfortunately their marketing and business divisions are top notch world class--that means we have to put up with the former. I hope they get as close to making me happy as possible. Would it be out of the question for them to release at least some of the Windows source code or IE's source code? I hope not, I would dearly like to see what the hell that rendering engine is doing sometimes
Their fears are obvious, people scanning the code for bugs
I seriously hope you change your mind about Microsoft. I mean, I hope that the community--those who make the decisions--are willing to work with Microsoft or at least hear them out. The open source community and licenses should be safe enough that anyone can use them or take part in them without finding a haft of a knife in their back. If they aren't, they need to be changed, hence all the debate on the GPLv3. If you're telling me that Microsoft is exploiting the Open Source Initiative for their own good, I question who's at fault here--Microsoft or OSI? Because Microsoft excels at making software make money, open source should excel just at making software work for everyone.
I apologize for submitting a dupe.
From that blog posting: I also run a training class that teaches people around the company how to engage in open source projects and make them successful. Now, after reading the higher ranked comments from the first article, I know many of you saw this as disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics on order with a politician, the RIAA or Steve Ballmer.
But this blog is written by someone who's genuinely interested in Microsoft becoming part of OSS efforts. Will it happen? Probably not as a good many of you pointed out.
The real question is, when it doesn't happen, what was the real reason? This is tough, because Microsoft is a large company. I felt the pain of using their products when I had to stay at work until midnight on Wednesday trying to get AJAX (that worked fine in Firefox) working in IE. But this is only one of their many products. Is it fair for me to condemn their application for hundreds of other products for OSS certification based on a few tools I've used?
My answer to that is that "I don't think so."
What I'm trying to say is that the open source community is a community. Once you start to blame Microsoft for everything, turn a cold shoulder towards them whenever they even mildly reach out, you're essentially becoming them on the other side of the mirror. What's worse is that this attitude will ensure that there will never be a point in time in the future when Microsoft can reconcile with OSS. I think the fact that even one person inside the company is reaching out says that Microsoft as an entity is not 100% against opening a code base. They have great marketing and business tactics, they are hear to stay for as far as I can see. I think that the attitude should be open arms under the right conditions instead of a persistent never ending cold war or middle east-style conflict in software today.
Will I be jumped on as not being a hardliner open source advocate? Probably. Because I care far more about the success of everyone than I do the success of either side.
The people running the accreditation will no doubt be very stringent on the licenses passing OSS certification. I'm not a lawyer but I doubt any of the MS-GL/SL/RL licenses will pass. I hope it's not an outright rejection. I hope there's talking between the OSI and MS, I hope there's negotiations, I chances are given, I hope for compromise, I hope that some of the projects end up as OSS, I hope to use Microsoft's software, whether I pay for it or not, and to be able to see the source in the future.
Everyone needs to make money, I need to make money. This is a capitalistic society. I don't blame Microsoft for making money, I blame them for failing to see the folly of their position. I believe a different pricing scheme could net them billions more dollars & millions more users. I believe that slowly opening up the code on more and more of their products can only improve it. I believe that people will steal it one way or another if they want to so your job shouldn't be to catch them but to take away that motivation.
In the end, if you rail against Microsoft for doing this, you're only building the barrier higher. I wouldn't recommend an "you're either with us or against us" attitude, I personally do not feel that has gotten anyone anywhere before. The world is not black & white, software is no different.
Why do System Administrators get a day? Why not Database Administrators? Why not Systems Architects? Why not Software Developers? All of these people are needed just as much as any of the others to achieve success.
System Administrators must be much different at other companies because I haven't met one that I've particularly thought deserves a whole freaking day devoted to celebrating them.
If you can read this, thank your sysadmin Yeah, and when do you think the Software Developer who made and maintains the page, the web browser, the web server and the operating systems of both the client and host? Gee, it's not hard to recognize that everyone contributes a vital need to meet a goal. If they didn't, they wouldn't be on the team!
Flamebait, I know
But that's not what happened and I think that's important for people to recognize. This was not unlike Frodo starting off on a quest thinking he wasn't going to get anywhere (though the motivation and implications are not so huge). It's the classic hero-by-accident story and since it's a true story, I love it all the more.
You know, I always thought about writing to Paul Harvey (if he's still alive) and asking him to do a "And that's the rest of the story" on Linus. That would be some classic stuff. Although most the listeners, probably not even sure what Linux is let alone know its creator Linus, would probably think he's suffering from some form of dementia set on by age
Not extremely innovative, I've seen web interfaces for torrent clients.
Neat? Yes. A good project? Maybe. "Huge step forward?" Not really, in my opinion.
I question the motives for bringing torrents to cellphones unless you can use other cell phones as download points (hence the name Peer to Peer). That's where the speedup comes from. I think cell phones are pinched at their access point, P2P apps on the phone aren't going to change that, they will even make it worse if both phones are fighting two separate choke points. Not sure if this is well thought out.
Seems to be primarily concerned wtih acquisitions that caused the death of companies. What about the acquisition and death of Netscape? I don't think it deserved to die and it was pretty much decided in multiple settlements that Microsoft's bundling of IE with Windows destroyed any chance Netscape had.
I've personally never used their old products but, you know, I do use Mozilla and it's derivatives and it's a fine browser. Unfortunate they didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell with Microsoft's actions.
*Beef McHardSlab (hero) shoots a ray gun to ignite flammable gas into a channel that a cripple man (traitor) has taken refuge in*
Mike: "And our brave hero roasts the disabled man!"
A few months back on Shout!'s website, fans were asked to vote on which of the four scheduled Film Crew releases would be the first on store shelves, the winner was the 1961 clunker Hollywood After Dark. Also know as Walk The Angry Beach and The Unholy Choice, the "film" features future Golden Girls star Rue McClanahan getting down to her skivvies and shaking it for all she's worth when her acting career fails - oddly enough that's the story of the film too. It might also be worth mentioning the Rifftrax effort they put together a while ago, with more info/comments on the Slashdot article.
Freak button accident when he was seven.
..."
It's no coincidence that he always wears a mock turtleneck sweater with no buttons to kill him on the front and a pair of zippered jeans.
You think Ballmer's a nut, you should see Jobs talk to his employees: "For every button I find on this interface, I shall kill you
This article was a fairly interesting journey into Shannon's world of Information Theory but, in my opinion, it is little more than an exercise in applying that kind of idea to user input devices on small electronics.
I understand the enumeration and recognize that it scales quite quickly per key. The reason I don't think this has been employed or will be employed is that people are not willing to take the time climb a learning curve--even if it would take them a few weeks of memorization and the time saved over their life will be huge. If that were the case, we'd all just use one button and our handhelds would interpret Morse code (see summary). The implementation discussed here is probably even more confusing than Morse code.
On my current phone, I have 9 buttons that I push and depress to cycle through different sections of the alphabet. How is this any different? It's four less buttons and a hell of a lot more memorizing, if you ask me.
Also, I've heard before that "it takes longer to learn to play checkers at the master level than it does chess. What checkers lacks in breadth, it makes up in precision and finality." I realize that puts me at risk of being modded as flamebait but I wonder if any other Slashdot reader can confirm or contest that.
How in the hell could DRM prevent this?
But, then again, look at what I'm criticizing! I challenge anyone to list one technology or product that DRM has successfully 'worked' on (in that it prevents piracy). This is laughable and brings the phrase "defective by design" to whole new levels I never thought possible. Not only will it be defective, use cycles and memory on your machine but it will probably make the quality worse. Bravo, DRM, bravo.
Nothing I've found on this lays out the implementation so here's my prediction. SoundExchange wants the minimum offer/DRM model in place. Then they can prove it's possible to still streamrip. Then where does that put the web radio sites? At the mercy of SoundExchange, of course, because they implemented something that didn't satisfy a contract.
- # Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium Edition
- # NVIDIA GeForce 6150 integrated graphics
- # Dell USB keyboard and USB 2-button mouse
- # Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
- # Integrated 7.1-channel audio
- # 56k PCI data/fax modem
- # Microsoft Works 8.5
- # Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0
- # Roxio Creator Basic
- # McAfee Security 30-day trial
- # Earthlink application software
- # Windows Vista PC-Restore
- # 1-year limited warranty and at-home service
Having experienced all the above software (with the exception of Earthlink application software whatever that is), I'm going to say that yes, it is loaded with crapware. Scariest one on that list would probably be the earthlink application software because that's the most generic name for a product I can ever think of.The other differences between these two machines is they have comparable memory, DVD burner & GPU, the Dell's hard drive & CPU are a lot better. The ArsTechnica article mentions upgrades at a price, you could probably get the IMPACT up to the Dell range and get it close which is probably pretty important for the average consumer who doesn't want to deal with the ordeal of reinstalling Windows just to get a clean slate.
... and to the rest of the world it was, rather bizarrely, being associated with the policies of the Bush administration. I hope, for the sake of everything that I believe in, this is a false statement. It's sad that I have to go on living knowing that while I was alive a man was elected president of my country (twice!) & in that time, he was able to put a foul taste in your mouth upon saying "democracy."I guess we can still say that the core ideas of democracy are good, that only awful men with awful goals and intentions used democracy to do wrong. I guess today Marxism sounds like an idea with potential though historically men like Joseph Stalin & Mao Zedong have given it a social stigma that the terrible things they did under its name are inherent and must occur when the idea is put into practice.
I hope the rest of the world is not convinced that democracy comes hand in hand with the actions of the United States of America today. Hopefully other countries will become model democracies for the rest of the world.
I hope the theory of democracy is resilient enough to withstand the current administration and that it survives as a concept that can be taught to children as the model of the most fair form of government. I also hope that the rest of the world aspires to become democratic--as has been the popular progression for quite sometime. Ironically, we are tarnishing the image of a system that we hope the Iraqi people to embrace--quite possibly the reason that effort fails.
The history books will indeed be interesting to read when I am a withered old man.
I like this quote from Winston Churchill that explains while democracy is not perfect, it is the best we've got: Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Finally, I will no longer live in fear of being introduced to counts, those cute lovable jawas, having a drink at the Cantina, bringing prey back to my cave, being reunited with my father or vice versa!
Yes sir, I can now tell the next robed guy where to shove it when I'm told his aren't the droids I'm looking for.
- Get an extremely accurate analysis of your words per minute in typing.
- Search through the log and double check that you correctly entered all of your banking account numbers, credit card and personal information on all of your internet forms.
- Do searches on the log to see if you ever accidentally typed "teh" and how many times that happened.
- Compare your Letter Frequency to the standard featured in Edgar Alan Poe's The Gold Bug
As you can see, there are many fun & great things that one can do with the potential of these new key logging features.</sarcasm>
True.
That doesn't mean that his arguments don't have merit. It certainly doesn't, but just because these 'tech bloggers' are the other side of the equation and they have a pay check at stake doesn't mean that their argument isn't equally as valid--does it?
I've never even heard the arguments and underpinnings against the GPLv3 concerning the adoption of Linux! Perhaps you should include both sides of the discussion in your article if you wish for me to consider you a journalist.
If I ever saw FUD of FUD, this is it.
If you're planning on doing a two year technical college kind of thing then I recommend you to do otherwise. The auxillary courses that a four year technical college gave me have to a great extent been useful (possibly more so than the technical courses I took).
Assuming you've got a four year college plan, I would recommend you make two separate plans from your college's website. Take the IT path and pick out all your generals & then all your electives (it doesn't have to be accurate, just a rough guess). Then do the same with computer science. I'll bet you'll see that a lot of general electives overlap so take mostly those your first semester. While you're there, I think you'll be exposed to more students in the same and other realms. How do you so easily discount electrical engineering when IT & computer science are your obvious choices?
In America, there would be absolutely nothing wrong with changing from one to the other in the middle of your college career. It might mean more work but that's better than a lifetime of regret. In fact, it's almost expected you change your mind five or six times in college where I went to school. Sure, it'd take people five or six years to graduate but it's their choice.
I would recommend you do the above for not only IT & CSci but also EE & Computer Engineering (kind of a cross between CSci & EE). In my undergrad, I took CSci, Math & Music Theory courses to a heavy extent. I finished one class away from a math minor and one class away from a music minor. I'm really happy that I was able to take those diverse courses that were often a refreshing break from Computer Science. But, in the end, I almost wish I had committed to the Computer Engineering course even though it would have edged out the extra math and music I took because it is such a demanding program.
In the end, there's jobs in both these fields. I can't argue for one over the other because I don't like IT/Business people. Why do I hate them? Because I don't think they really care about anything other than money and they're often performing trivial jobs